


Bug on a Plate

by Lindstrom



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: Still Have Powers, Angst/Hurt/Comfort, COVID19, Canon Disabled Character, Charles Is a Big Dorkface, Charles Xavier has a Ph.D in Adorable, Charles Xavier has a bad day, Charles Xavier in a Wheelchair, Charles is a professor in every universe, Coronavirus, Erik is a Sweetheart, M/M, Meet-Cute, Pandemic - Freeform, Slow Burn, coronavirus roommates fic, meet-annoyed, middle aged romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-01-27 05:17:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21386716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lindstrom/pseuds/Lindstrom
Summary: Written for the prompt: Charles is having the worst possible day. He’s still optimistic and brave, but it’s the WORST day where everything just goes wrong so by the end he’s pretty defeated by it. Erik does something nice to cheer him up. Bonus points if they aren’t dating or even friends at this point, or even if Charles thinks Erik doesn’t like him.For kianspo, because I love her tumblr, but I don't have a tumblr, so I can't just leave comments and 'like' things over there, so I wrote a story instead. (I signed up for tumblr about six months later:lindstrom2020)April 2020 update: This was originally a one-shot that takes place in October 2019. I'm going to add chapters and turn it into a COVID19 roommate fic.Be sure to check out the gorgeous moodboard created by xczielhere
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 54
Kudos: 315





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kianspo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kianspo/gifts).

OCTOBER 2019

“It’s a field trip!”

Charles smiled tolerantly. College freshmen were as excited about field trips as third graders, even though they were just crossing the South Field to the Butler Library to see the DNA Art Forms exhibit on loan from the University of Kansas. The artistry of DNA’s structure inspired some beautiful interpretations, and Charles had learned over the years that the differing visual approach often helped his general education freshmen understand biology a bit better. Or at least enjoy the class period when he didn’t lecture.

Besides, he liked field trips too. Especially when late October blessed New York City with one last crisp and perfect fall day before degenerating into the sleet and yuck of a New York winter.

The registration office crammed 112 freshmen into his class. Charles had taught the class for five years now, after reading one too many student reviews of the adjunct professors and T.A.s who typically drew the freshmen assignments. If Columbia had the best graduate programs in genetics, then shouldn’t its undergraduate classes in biology be just as impressive? A few other tenured professors had grudgingly followed Charles’ example, though not without griping at him for his idealism.

As they got to the doors of the Kent Building, the teenagers streamed around his wheelchair, heading for freedom.

“We’re meeting in the library lobby!” Charles called out, knowing about a fourth of them would ditch class entirely.

Sean held the door for Charles to wheel himself through. Charles checked. Yes, it was Sean. Charles had long-since rationalized using his telepathy to pick students’ names out of their heads. He couldn't possibly learn more than a hundred names every semester, and people usually had their names readily accessible. He could pick up a name without violating anyone’s privacy.

Charles grabbed the opportunity to draw Sean into talking to Angel, the only Hispanic female in the class. Despite all the talk about racial diversity, Ivy League schools remained overwhelmingly white and male, and Charles made a point of reaching out to try and make connections between minorities and everyone else. Angel and Armando, one of three black men in the class, were sitting together in every lecture, and Charles wasn’t sure if they had anyone else in their study group. Sean probably just needed an introduction to pull Angel into his social circle. 

It seemed to work. Sean and Angel started talking, and then Angel waved Armando over. Sean’s friends joined them and within a few minutes, Charles saw Angel and Irene exchanging phone numbers.

Within a very few minutes, a race broke out. A dozen freshmen with laptops in their backpacks and phones in their hands took off. Charles laughed at their energy, and then startled as someone grabbed his chair, the movement jerking the wheels through his palms.

“Wanna race?”

Charles twisted to see who was holding the handgrips on his wheelchair. It was Alex Summers, who sat at the back of the class and didn’t participate. So far. Charles had learned over his years of teaching that making an emotional connection with a student caused more real learning than a brilliant lecture. This field trip was about making room for those informal emotional connections that made the classroom so much more than just an informational exchange. Joining in the race would earn him ‘cool’ points, and his students would engage with him on a deeper level.

That was why Charles said yes, even though he generally never let anyone push his wheelchair. If Alex would raise his hand and ask a question next week, it would be worth it.

“Professor’s gonna kick your asses!” Alex hollered, and then he was running.

Two dozen more students started running with them across College Walk, and Charles caught the excitement from their minds. Yes, he was winning cool points. Charles raised his arms in the air and yelled something that might have passed for a cheer. He hoped no one heard the undercurrent of fear. Alex was pushing him awfully fast. Charles never went fast anymore.

There was a curb coming up, a small one, just three inches. An able-bodied person wouldn’t even notice the step up. By the time Charles realized that Alex wasn’t aiming for the ramp cut-out just a meter to the right, they’d already hit the curb and skewed hard. The wheelchair bumped up and over the curb without tipping over. 

Instinctively, Charles grabbed at the handrests to keep himself seated, but inertia won the battle and he slid out, his legs folding up awkwardly and the sleeve of his shirt caught in that place where the plastic molded armrest was attached to the metal beneath it. Damn the high quality fabric of his button down shirt. Instead of tearing easily, it stayed intact while his shoulder took the brunt of the twisting.

“Oh, shit! I’m sorry! Professor!” Alex babbled apologies, but the really terrible thing was his attempt to pull him back into the seat of his wheelchair. Pain flared up his right shoulder and down his arm.

“Let go!” Charles said.

Alex didn’t let go.

Charles’ fear overwhelmed his ethics. If he pulled a rotator tendon, he’d have to give up his manual wheelchair. His shoulder measurement and the muscle definition in his arms were the only body parts he was still proud of after 17 years in a wheelchair, and he would lose it all if he hurt his shoulder. Vanity and independence were both threatened. Charles froze Alex’s body to stop the pulling, then used his hand to untangle Charles’ sleeve from the armrest. He was violating every law of telepathic ethics right now, but he may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb; no sense stopping before he’d finished the job. Charles used Alex’s body to lift him back into his wheelchair, using proper lifting techniques so as not to injure Charles further.

Finished, Charles took his fingers from his temple. Alex twitched as Charles let go of the control.

“I do apologize,” Charles said immediately.

At the same time, Alex said, “I’m really sorry, Professor.”

The class was crowding around, all 112 teenagers, chorusing out things like ‘are you alright?’ and ‘what happened?’ and ‘get out of my way!’ At that last one, Charles looked up to see about two dozen cell phones aimed at him. Damn Generation Z all the way to hell, and their phones with them.

“Please don’t post that,” Charles asked. He had to ask nicely, rather than roar at them about the disrespect and cruelty of posting pictures on social media of a handicapped person being injured further.

“Too late!” someone sang out, but most of the rest of them sheepishly lowered their phones and mumbled ‘okay.’ 

“Are you okay, Professor?” It was Armando, pushing himself next to the Professor. He physically reached over and pushed someone’s phone so it wasn’t aimed at Charles.

“Perfectly fine,” Charles said cheerfully. “I believe I forfeited the race, though. Who won?” 

With smiles and small talk, he got the conversation off himself and onto his students. Children this age would rather talk about themselves than about a middle-aged professor’s possible injury, so it was easy to do. Charles was 43. Raven insisted he didn’t look a day over 50. Some days that joke was funnier than on other days.

“I’ll take over the driving, you asshole,” Sean loudly proclaimed to Alex, shouldering him out of the way and putting his hands on the grips of Charles’ wheelchair.

“No, I can take it from here.” That’s what Charles meant to say. Instead, the words were cut off in a gasp of pain when he tried to move his right arm to grasp the wheel. He smothered it under a smile and rested his arm on his lap instead. What he actually said was, “Keep it below the speed limit.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Alex said again.

Charles spent the rest of the way to the library trying to convince Alex that everything was just fine, no harm done. That was a lie, but there was no sense making Alex feel guilty about it. Besides, Charles had committed a fireable offense, even for a tenured professor, by taking over control of Alex’s body with telepathy. If Alex reported him, he’d be packing up his office by tonight. He wanted to ask Alex to please not report him, but if Alex reported the request when he reported Charles’ violation of telepathic ethics, things would go even worse for him. There was a faint chance that his lawyer friend, Moira, might be able to argue an exception for emergencies. If anyone could convince an able-bodied review board that a shoulder injury for a paraplegic was a bona fide emergency, it would be Moira.

Once they were inside the library, Charles realized that the odd repetitive bump he kept feeling wasn’t the wheels rolling over the seams in the concrete. The collision with the curb must have knocked his wheels out of alignment. They were cambered, and the alignment had to be adjusted at a shop. That meant a trip to Jake’s Jazzy Scooters and Chairs in Brooklyn. Corny name; fabulous work. They used to be in Manhattan, but the rent was cheaper in Brooklyn. He could call Hank to come with him this Wednesday; classes ended for both of them at 11:00 a.m. Or perhaps they would be willing to make a house call? Would it be terribly elitist if he offered a $500 tip just so he didn't have to go all the way to Brooklyn? Yes, yes it would.

About 75 students stayed with the class and wandered around the DNA Art Form display. Charles added a few explanations and observations when he could gather up a few students, but he didn’t try to do a guided tour like he usually did. For one thing, he was at the mercy of whichever student was pushing his chair. Charles gave up on the educational effort and just hoped the students were making friends, forming study groups, and thinking their professor was a cool dude. Did anyone say ‘cool dude’ anymore? Should he be chill instead? Or wicked? Or was it dope now? Dope. He was pretty sure it was dope this year. Dope professors got better classroom participation.

When the class period ended, Charles waved them all off and the crowd galloped out of the library. Fortunately, he had two hours before his next class.

Charles realized his predicament as soon as he tried to push his chair. He still couldn’t use his right arm, and the misalignment meant his chair pulled to the right. He stopped after a couple of meters.

The battle between his pride and reality was short. Charles got his phone out and called Hank. When you were asking for a favor, a phone call was still the best option. The voice mail on Hank’s office phone picked up, and announced that he was away at a conference and all his classes were cancelled until next Monday. Charles pressed the ‘off’ button. That’s right; he’d forgotten about Hank’s conference.

Now what? Charles had lots of friends, but the friends he could call and ask for help with his damn disability were scarce, more because of Charles’ pride than because people wouldn’t be willing to help. He scrolled through his contact list and then put his phone away. He wasn’t helpless, dammit, just disabled. There was a difference, and Charles could lecture about the distinction at length.

Push, coast, stop and adjust his direction. Push, coast, stop and adjust his direction. By fits and starts, Charles made his way outside the library. The journey from the Butler Library to his office in the Fairchild Building usually took 15-20 minutes. Today, it was likely to take the whole two hour break before his next class. About thirty minutes into the epic saga of Charles’ quest to travel a block away, he discovered that he could use his right arm enough to change his direction in the ‘coast’ portion of his movement. He still couldn’t push with his right arm, but being able to steer while moving helped.

The journey back to his office took one hour and fifteen minutes. Not one person offered to help him. He was not going to think judgmental thoughts about that, because it was likely his fault. He got testy when people offered to help him. He wasn’t needy, he was just fine, and anyone who offered to help found that out pretty damn quick. If no one knew his answer would have been different today, that’s because he didn’t want to do anything else telepathically unethical, like plant a desire in someone's mind to offer help to that poor man with the damaged wheelchair.

Charles shut his office door behind him, rubbed his eyes and took deep breaths until the frustration and anger let go of his chest and he could breathe normally. This is when he should recite his three ‘gratitudes’ that made up the floor of gratitude that kept him safe from despair. 

_ Able News _ interviewed him a couple of years ago for a feature story on successful people living with a disability. After talking about Charles’ professional accomplishments, they’d gotten around to asking about how he coped with his disability. Charles had read enough of these articles to know that, after nodding in acknowledgment that being in a wheelchair could really suck, he was supposed to say something motivational and encouraging. Charles had clung to words like that all through his late twenties when he was making the adjustment after that stupid accident that could have been prevented a thousand different ways, all of which Charles privately obsessed about for years; publicly he had a great attitude.

So he had thought about what he would say that might help another twentysomething whose life had just been irrevocably altered.

“I have a gratitude floor above that flood of despair,” Charles explained. “I’ve thought out several things I’m grateful for, and when days get hard, I let myself acknowledge that it’s hard, but I don’t let the difficulty drag me any lower than my gratitude floor. It’s got main planks in it, and then various smaller boards that change from time to time. But as long as I focus on these things, I stay above the despair.” Of course, then the interviewer had asked what his gratitude planks were.

Honestly, the first one was that he was filthy rich and could buy anything he needed to make his life easier, but he wasn’t going to say that in an interview. Instead, he’d talked about his friends (loads of people) and family (Raven was that entire category) who meant so much to him. He mentioned how meaningful his career was. “Finally, I’m relieved for all the things I can still physically do,” Charles had finished. His spinal cord injury was incomplete, which meant he had enough feeling that he could get to the toilet without help, and without needing colostomy bags and catheters. He wasn’t going to say that in an interview either, so he talked about how his shoulders bulked up from using a manual wheelchair. Then he beat the interviewer at an arm wrestle.

It had been a good interview and a good article. Charles meant every word of it. You had to focus on the good to keep from letting the bad drag you down. The problem was that he’d relied so much on gratitude for his strong shoulders and arms over the years that possibly losing some of that to a shoulder injury splintered that vital board in the gratitude floor.

Instead of cheering up, Charles went through every terrible thing that could happen if his shoulder hurt forever. 

It was an awful list.

Then he went through every terrible thing that could happen if Alex reported him for taking over his body and he lost his tenure under a cloud of unethical use of his mutation. 

That was an awful list too.

Then he pulled himself out of his funk, painted a smile on his face, and went to teach his next class.

* * *

Charles had office hours toward the end of the day, which meant keeping up the cheerful facade until the bitter end. When the last student finally (finally!) left his office, he let the smile fall off his face and quit trying to pretend he wasn’t scared and angry. He wished Hank wasn’t at that conference. Charles was so consistently praised for his good attitude and the way he never let his disability impede him that there were very few people who knew how much he struggled sometimes. Actually, Hank was the only person on that list. Hank would help him home, and listen to him bitch, and not try to cheer him up before he wanted to cheer up. 

Should he call an Uber? Or take the bus? An Uber would offer door-to-door service. But the bus had a wheelchair lift. Would it hurt less to wheel himself to and from bus stops? Or try to maneuver himself from his wheelchair into a car and then back out while an Uber driver who had likely never driven someone in a wheelchair stared at him?

Charles decided on the bus. He left immediately to give himself more time to get to his bus stop on 120th Street. He scored cool points by being environmentally woke enough to take public transit. Dope points. Whatever. 

Come to think of it, he spent a lot of time brown-nosing his students. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? What was wrong with professors these days?

It hurt like hell to get his right arm over the armrest, but once it was in position, if he kept his right arm mostly still, he could use his hand to help a bit. The trip to the bus stop was slow and awkward, but he did it. Charles got himself maneuvered into the wheelchair area on the bus and set the brake. There. He was going to be fine. 

The bus was fairly full tonight. He recognized a couple of regulars, and they exchanged nods. Most New Yorkers kept their heads down and refused eye contact, but if you’d been riding the same bus together for years, you risked acknowledging someone’s presence once in a while. 

Charles twisted in his seat to stretch out his back muscles, then his neck, testing when the shoulder pain started to affect his range of motion. Twisted all the way to the right, he saw someone in the back of the bus that he recognized. Ginger-tinged short hair, wool coat, granite jawline. He was looking at a phone, so Charles could stare all he wanted. The man looked up, glanced out the window, and then looked forward, right at Charles.

Charles looked away before either of them had to acknowledge seeing the other one. Erik Lehnsherr, the phenomenally rich and talented engineer and business tycoon who was taking a year long sabbatical from his German company, We Build Everything, Inc., (or something like that) to teach in Columbia’s engineering department and undoubtedly poach the best talent he could find away from academia. Columbia’s president had fallen all over himself at the honor of introducing Lehnsherr at the faculty’s fall opening social. Lehnsherr had replied with all of five words (‘it’s good to be here’). The laconic reply drew a polite laugh. Feature articles about Lehnsherr always joked about how he was a man of few words. His English was impeccable, though, as he had spent more than a decade in the United States in his teens and twenties.

Charles may have spent more time than was absolutely necessary following Lehnsherr’s career. He appreciated the man’s genius. His technology and inventions were consistently brilliant, environmentally conscious and aesthetically pleasing. Besides, there weren’t very many genius millionaires who were also bisexual in this world, and Charles was guilty of nursing a celebrity crush. He flattered himself that if he ever did manage to meet Lehnsherr in person, they could find a few things in common. Gay genius millionaires were a tiny group. It wasn’t entirely outside the bounds of realism that Lehnsherr might want to meet him too.

However, Charles had gone fishing for an introduction at the fall faculty social only because he was friendly, and welcoming a visiting professor to the faculty was something he should do. It was _ not _ because of the man’s jawline, or cheekbones, or the way his suit draped on that delicious body or any other shallow reason that might have crossed someone else’s mind. He would have been friendly no matter what Lehnsherr looked like. Though he had to admit, Lehnsherr was even more compelling in person. Head shots in magazines and Youtube videos on a computer screen just didn’t do justice to the way the air around him crackled with energy. That could have been his mutation. Or it could have been all in Charles' perception of him.

“Hello there,” Charles had said cheerfully, wheeling himself through the crowd, to get the attention of someone in the group of engineers.

It was Azazel who had turned around, which was simply unfortunate. Azazel had never liked Charles, which Charles did not understand. You didn’t have to agree with someone’s politics to be civil, but no one had ever taught Azazel that. 

“Erik, meet our resident assimilationist. This is Charles Xavier, from the genetics faculty. He works on mutant suppression techniques.”

Charles opened his mouth to defend himself against such a horrid mischaracterization of what he thought and did, but Erik only glanced at his wheelchair, looked at him as if were a bug on a plate, one that he might squash later if he got around to it, and then turned back to answer Janos Quested’s question, which was apparently about alloys used in weather satellites. Once Azazel turned his back, Charles was facing a row of butts in suits. He hated it when everyone was standing.

Well, it didn’t matter anyway, Charles insisted to himself as he wheeled away. The Biology and Genetics Department may be next door to the Engineering Department in the Fu Foundation building, but you could avoid someone if you set your mind to it. He was unlikely to see Lehnsherr again before his sabbatical year ended and he returned to Germany to continue running his million-Euro empire. He joined Moira McTaggert and Alison Claire, found a glass of champagne and determinedly made cheerful small talk for at least twenty minutes before he could make his apologies and duck out without anyone noticing how much getting brushed off like that by his celebrity crush had stung. 

He’d been right; he hadn’t seen Erik Lehnsherr again. Riding the same bus, when he was in the front in the handicapped spot, and Lehnsherr was all the way to the back up the stairs and there were at least 25 people between them, did not count as seeing him again. Charles sighed. If not for those damn stairs, and the fact that he was having the worst day of his life (so far this year, because if you went far enough back there were days to eclipse this one, but Charles tried not to think of them), Charles would have put on his big girl panties (as Raven said), bit the bullet (as Moira said), and tried to fix the mess Azazel had made with that dreadful introduction eight weeks ago.

If his shoulders slumped a bit and he stared morosely at his lap rather than checking his phone like every other person on the bus, it was because today had been hard in general, not that he wished he could walk over and sit down next to Erik Lehnsherr.

Seventeen years of listening to the beeping as the wheelchair ramp lowered, and it still grated on his nerves. He’d written a letter to New York Transit once, asking them to change the pitch to something less ear-shredding. It turned out the pitch was set by some federal regulation and was therefore as immutable as the law of gravity. 

Charles also had issues with the law of gravity. 

Charles got himself centered on the sidewalk and pushed off. His apartment building was a block and a half away, and none of it was uphill. That was important. He pushed, coasted while correcting the direction with his bad arm, then pushed again. Every so often he had to stop entirely to turn himself straight again. The other pedestrians soldiered on around him. He put up some mental shields to avoid thoughts of annoyance like slaps in the face from intruding on him as he struggled down the sidewalk. Given his mood, he’d likely yell back at them, and it was never good form to yell out loud about something someone hadn’t even vocalized.

Then it started to rain. 

Fuck the environment, Charles was going to buy a van. Tonight. Fuck elitism, he was going to hire a full-time driver too. Fuck dope points. He was never taking his students on another field trip again. Just fuck everything.

Rain had not been in the forecast today. Rain was especially difficult when one was pushing a wheelchair, because one could not hold an umbrella and push one’s wheelchair at the same time. One also could not call one’s sister for help, because then one had to listen to one’s sister nag one about getting an electric wheelchair and stop faking like he was still 29 and there was something morally superior about using a manual wheelchair at his age. Forty-three was _ not _ old, though since Raven had essentially stopped aging in her mid-twenties, she tended to gloat about it more than she needed to. 

The rain wasn’t that bad. He didn’t need to maneuver the bag slung over the back of his wheelchair around so he could get out his rain slicker and then maneuver the bag back into place, and then contort himself to get the rain slicker on while sitting in a chair that had both armrests and a high back. Charles thought that would be a good empathy exercise for the able-bodied. Put them in a wheeled office chair with armrests and have them get into their coat without standing up or putting any weight on their feet. It was trickier than you’d think. 

No rain slicker. He ducked his head so the raindrops wouldn’t hit his face and pushed himself off. Push, coast, turn and stop. Push, coast, turn and stop. He got all the way across the crosswalk like that, and even beat the signal change. No one honked at him for being the last one in the crosswalk.

Victory!

It was short-lived.

One building away from Charles’ building stood a gorgeous sugar maple. You could tell the month of the year by the color of that tree’s leaves, from the bright yellow-green in the spring, all the way to the deep fiery red in the fall. Some of those red leaves still clung to the branches, while the rest had fallen and mostly been swept away by the wind and the New York City Sanitation Department. The problem was the roots. The roots had broken up the sidewalk, creating the Himalayas just thirty meters from Charles’ front door. Well, not really the Himalayas, but for Charles they might as well have been.

Usually he could go around them. But sometimes, like today, Stop’N’Pawn put out a sidewalk display that blocked the unbroken section of the sidewalk. According to the sandwich board next to the wheeled trolley, one could buy something amazing for only $199. The details were lost in the chalk running in the rain.

Charles stared at that damn sandwich board and trolley, the rain beginning to drip off his wavy hair and down his collar, and considered going into the pawn shop and asking them to move the items on the sidewalk so he could get past. He’d tried that a few times. The store was so cluttered that he couldn’t get to the counter and had to shout from the doorway. Then the shop owner, who was ridiculously large, would shout back at him, and only move the junk once Charles started threatening to sue him. The owner would move the junk, but he would also call Charles a cripple, and that was the nicest thing he would say.

Charles didn't have the energy today. 

There was a bit of sidewalk that was just hilly on the other side of the tree, rather than broken, between the tree and the curb. It might be wide enough for Charles to get through; he hadn’t tried it before. He wheeled over. Going left was easy. The rain was starting to run in the gutter, carrying dead leaves. He had to make a sharp right, and that hurt, and then he pushed off. 

Pushing with his left arm to get the right wheel up and over the biggest part of the hill made it harder to steer. He was too close to the curb. When he tried to angle away from the curb, his wheel caught. Charles looked around, trying to make eye contact with someone who might come help him, but everyone had their heads down, hurrying in the rain. Angry at his predicament, Charles yanked on the wheel and instantly wished he could take it back. The wheel went off the curb and he started to fall. He was going to land in the rain-filled gutter, and all he could think was to hope that no one would post a picture of it online. People would ignore him when he needed help, but he’d bet good money that no one would ignore him if he became a photo op.

Charles closed his eyes and tried to brace for impact.

Instead, his wheelchair righted itself, and then skimmed lightly over the rest of the hill on the sidewalk and settled on the flat section again, safely beyond the obstacle course of roots and broken concrete. If that wasn’t enough of a miracle, it stopped raining, but only around Charles. All around him, raindrops kept hitting the ground.

Charles looked up. There was an umbrella over his head. It was being held by Erik Lehnsherr, who was studying him as if he were a bug on a plate. Charles was used to being stared at by a certain segment of the population. Many people refused to look at someone in a wheelchair at all. Others would openly stare; they were staring at the chair more than Charles. This stare was different. He was looking at Charles like he was a mystifying, incomprehensible bug.

“You’re optimistic,” Erik stated. “I’ve never understood optimistic people.”

“How did you come to assess my entire personality in the course of our very brief acquaintance?” Charles always got more British and testy when he was flustered.

“Realistically, anyone should have known that you couldn’t get a wheelchair over that area of the sidewalk.” Erik turned to point back at the hilly section of sidewalk that had nearly landed Charles in the gutter. He moved the umbrella when he pointed, and Charles leaned to stay underneath its shelter. 

“I didn’t have a lot of options, if you want to exercise your astute powers of observation and tell me which part of the sidewalk was passable,” Charles snapped.

Erik looked at him like the bug had broken the plate, and he wondered why.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.” Charles tried to push off, but his wheelchair canted to the right and stopped. This was not how he’d ever pictured talking to Erik Lehnsherr, and adding embarrassment to the pain, fear and frustration swung him wildly between desperation and anger. 

“I can help you with your chair, if you’re done being optimistic.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Charles could handle ridicule about being in a wheelchair, and even some of the prejudice that got aimed at telepaths. But ridiculing his personality, when he had to hold onto that optimism as a fucking survival mechanism, was really hitting below the belt. “I mean, I know you’re a fucking genius, and a metallokinetic magician, and whatever else they write about you in magazine articles, but that doesn’t give you the right to mock me. If you must know, I’ve had a hell of a day, and since when do we have the same bus stop because I would have noticed that some time in the past eight weeks!”

Erik started walking instead of having a decent fight, and Charles’ wheelchair followed him, staying centered under the umbrella.

“And now you’re kidnapping me?” Charles bellowed at him.

Erik whirled and crouched down to be eye level with him. Those large blue-gray eyes were all seriousness tinged with concern, the smile lines around them carved deeply enough to be visible even when he wasn’t smiling. “Look, I’m trying to get you home before you lose it. I know you took a bad fall today, I saw it on Twitter, and I got off the bus to make sure you got home okay. I’m not kidnapping you, or mocking you, or whatever else. I’m trying to help. I get that I’m doing a shitty job, but it wouldn’t be quite so hard if you’d cooperate. Get it?”

It was funny how you could keep a stiff upper lip when you knew you were on your own, but a bit of concern could unravel your composure. Charles studied the pattern of raindrops on his trousers and nodded, his damp and tangled hair falling into his face.

His wheelchair started moving again when Erik stood up. There was a soft grinding sound, then a pop, and then his chair rolled easily, without pulling to the right. He looked up at Erik, who looked back down at him without saying anything. He was still looking at Charles like he was a bug on a plate, but now the bug was one of those fierce and ugly jumping spiders and Erik was warily wondering if he would be attacked.

“Thanks. The alignment. Thanks,” Charles said.

“Mm,” was Erik’s only reply.

They had almost reached the door to Charles’ building when he processed something Erik had said. “Wait! Twitter?”

“Inside,” Erik said. The bug could be frog-marched across the plate by the force of that gaze.

The doorman opened the door, and Erik followed him in, shaking off his umbrella. Charles’ apartment was on the ground floor, as required by ADA regulations. If the power went out, the elevators didn’t work, so anyone with a wheelchair lived on the ground floor. 

Charles got his keys out, then realized he usually turned the deadbolt with his right hand. It was high enough up the door that he had to reach for it. The lock was stiff, and to be entirely honest, he wasn’t sure he could open the deadbolt today. 

Damn, so much of his life was about being disabled. He didn’t think of it constantly, he really didn’t. He’d adjusted well, and had his routines in place. Weeks could go by with Charles not really thinking about using a wheelchair at all. It was just part of his life. But since falling today, he hadn’t thought about anything else. Despite everything, he didn’t think of himself as fragile. Today had shown him that he was fragile, and he hated it.

He played with his keys, wishing he could unlock his deadbolt, and then capitulated with a sigh. “I hurt my shoulder in the fall. Could you?” Charles held the keys up to Erik.

Erik unlocked the door with the key, making Charles wonder if Erik was humoring him. A metallokinetic could likely unlock any lock on the planet without a key. He’d be a terrifying criminal.

“How long is it going to take you to get changed out of those wet clothes?” Erik asked.

That crossed the line into being patronizing. It wasn't any of Erik’s business. Charles scowled at him, and Erik met his look calmly. The bug on a plate was now a gimpy grasshopper -- probably some kid from Gen Z had pulled its hopper legs off (and posted a pic on Twitter) and Erik was wondering if he should put it out of its misery. “Probably forty-five minutes, why?”

“Because I’m going to go get us a takeaway, and I wondered how long I had.” Erik was already turned around.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?” Charles shouted at his back.

“No.”

* * *

Charles ended up taking a pair of scissors to that $125 shirt that had cost him the use of his shoulder. He also found out how tricky it was to use a pair of scissors left-handed. When he was finally finished, he threw away the shredded remains of what used to be a nice John Varvatos blue windowpane button down and felt some vindictive satisfaction.

Changing into sweats took longer than usual because he couldn’t twist his arm. Raising his arm above his head to get into another shirt seemed like a bad idea. Charles decided on a cardigan. He reached for the fuzzy brown cardigan he’d worn every evening this month, then hesitated and considered the blue cable knit cardigan that Raven bought for him because it matched his eyes. Oh, fuck it, who was he kidding? Vanity at his age was pathetic. Charles put his left arm through the sleeve of the fuzzy brown cardigan and draped the rest of it over his bare shoulder, buttoning his arm inside. 

Then he yanked it back off (gently) and stuffed it back in the drawer. He was a stupid fool, and an optimist, and a bug on a plate, and he could wear the cardigan that matched his eyes if he wanted to. Erik wasn’t going to know he’d changed it up a bit. It was a cardigan, not a tuxedo, and why was he spending so much time picking out a damn cardigan? Angry at himself, he settled the cardigan over his sore shoulder and went to dry his hair.

When he shut off the blow-dryer, he heard someone moving around in the living area of his apartment. Had he locked the deadbolt after Erik left? Or had the master criminal opened his locks? He wouldn’t have heard a knock with the blow-dryer on.

He put a comb through his hair, insisting to himself that he would have combed his hair after being rained on, even if he’d made it home without help. And really, he didn’t have any option but to go shirtless, but buttoning only one of the four buttons on the cardigan, which left some of Charles’ pecs visible, might have been a strategic decision. Better flaunt it while he could; if the shoulder pain was permanent, he’d shrivel down to a bony chest soon enough.

That thought flattened the tiny bit of excitement that had briefly lifted its head. There was a point when preening felt hopeless, more of a habit than a genuine belief that making yourself look nice mattered at all.

Charles wheeled himself out to the living area, where Erik was unloading takeout containers onto the dining table. The restaurant logo on the carrier was Otto’s Bistro, which Charles had never heard of. It must have been out of his routine area. After looking at the number of containers, Charles got out plates and silverware. Erik started taking lids off, and the smell was heavenly. Potatoes, something fried, lots of butter, and dill.

“Red wine or white?” Charles asked, going over to assess the contents of his wine fridge.

“Red, but don’t go to any trouble,” Erik replied.

“Because you haven’t?” Charles asked drily. He set the wine on the table and went back for glasses.

“You’re different than I’d pictured,” Erik said.

Charles could feel that bug-on-a-plate look drilling into his back between his shoulder blades. Suddenly, he was angry at himself for combing his hair and wearing a blue cardigan.

“Look, what Azazel said about me at the faculty social was a grave mischaracterization of what I think and what I do. I just don’t see the harm in trying to work together to assuage some of the humans’ more pressing concerns, rather than expecting them to pretend that it doesn’t make them nervous to know that some out-of-control teenager could wipe out most of lower Manhattan without really intending to. I mean, some mutations make _ me _ nervous, and I know that’s the pot calling the kettle black, but the dialogue doesn’t advance at all if we keep insisting that there is never any cause for concern just because we can’t choose whether or not we’re mutants. Mutations aren’t always some sort of harmless behavior like wanting to have sex with a consenting adult of your own gender if, oh, I said that out loud, shit, I should probably stop talking now. Shall we change the subject? Oh! Twitter! What did you say about Twitter earlier?”

The bug-on-a-plate look was back in full force. The bug was a cricket that wouldn’t shut up even when there was a truck barreling down to squash it.

“Twitter,” Charles prodded him.

“What the hell was all that?”

“You said something about Twitter,” Charles said doggedly.

“Everything before that.”

Erik handed him a box of something wrapped in dough that smelled like meat. Charles tipped it over on the edge of his plate and used his left hand to get some of the ravioli out, his right arm motionless on his lap. “At the faculty social, a couple months ago, Azazel said some things about me. I wanted to set the record straight.” After he said it, Charles realized he sounded like he’d spent the last two months obsessing about what he wanted to say to Erik. And while that was true, he would rather not have Erik know it.

“I know Azazel was full of shit. I’ve read your articles. I thought your TED talk about differentiating between biological evolution and social evolution was brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant. Nuanced. I doubt Azazel would have caught it, though.”

Charles very carefully arranged sauerkraut so it didn’t touch the ravioli. “You didn’t say any of that at the social.” Was he whining? He might be whining. 

“I didn’t want to engage with Azazel, and when I went to look for you after I finished talking to Janos, you’d already left.” 

“Oh.”

“So how has that idea played out for you? The TED talk was six years ago. Have your ideas evolved?”

“Have my ideas evolved? Is that a polite way of asking if I’m willing to admit that I was wrong?”

“Yes, are you willing to admit it?”

“I’m not wrong!”

Erik smiled, like the spider who had coaxed the bug off the plate and into its web. “Care to expand on that?”

Oh yes, Charles could expand on that at length and vociferously.

Charles and Erik argued biological evolution, social pressures and the conflict between safety and freedom while mixing beef gravy with dumplings. Erik was stubborn and articulate, which was an enchanting combination. Charles hadn’t had so much fun in an argument since Moira tried to convince him that the law requiring classification of mutant categories wouldn’t lead to mandatory registration. The law got hung up in some committee and never enacted, so both of them could think they would have been right if it passed.

Erik was packing up leftovers when Charles turned the conversation back to the topic Erik kept avoiding. “Twitter?” 

“Twitter.”

“I know one of my students took a picture and posted it online. What hashtag sent you the alert?” Had it been pushed to the entire Columbia faculty? The only way this day could get worse is if Columbia had decided to send him a virtual get-well card, tagged with his name and visible to the whole bloody world. Despite all Charles’ efforts to live a normal life, he was on some Forbes list of wealthy individuals (besides the inheritance, he held several patents in his own name), which meant more media visibility than he wanted. That horrible pic was poised to go viral, and Charles hadn’t even seen it yet.

Then the resulting scandal when Student Services investigated the complaint against him for unethical use of telepathy would go just as viral, and Charles would become a punchline for Jimmy Fallon, who tried to be woke, but still thought mutants were scary.

Erik’s voice was both soft and rough at the same time. Texture, his voice had texture. Charles wanted to wrap that texture around him like a blanket and sleep in it. “Some of my students were paying so much attention to their phones that I decided to make an example out of them. It turned out they were arguing in the comments of that picture of you. It was an even split between wishing you a speedy recovery, and trolling the girl who posted the photo.” 

Great, now while dealing with the fallout of going viral, he was going to have to reassure an 18-year-old girl that he wasn’t at all upset that she’d taken and posted a humiliating photo of him for the whole world to see when really he would like to reduce her phone to dust and make her write ‘Soulless tweets have the power to destroy the world’ (or perhaps something less apocalyptic once he calmed down) five hundred times using a pen and not copy and paste. 

“Who posted it?”

“Kitty Pryde.”

Even worse. Kitty came across as sweet and shy. Someone like Raven could have handled getting the smackdown and bounce back, but Kitty was likely to come out of this whole mess feeling worse than Charles, which meant he couldn’t betray a hint of his own feelings or he would look like he was joining the dogpile.

“I want to see it,” Charles said.

Rather than trying to argue him out of it, Erik tapped his phone and then handed it across the table to Charles. Bug-on-a-plate look, but now Erik felt bad that the bug was about to be squashed. 

The picture clearly showed Charles’ body lying half out of his wheelchair, but someone wearing a green shirt had been in Kitty’s way, which hid Charles’ face from the camera, for which he was profoundly grateful. His expression couldn’t become a meme, and since it was only the hashtag that identified him, this picture likely wouldn’t go viral worldwide. He should give extra credit to everyone who wore a green shirt today.

Charles looked at the picture more closely. Alex was clearly visible, his face intent with Charles’ concentration as he worked on getting the sleeve loose. If Alex did make the accusation, this photo would be proof of some sort.

Student Services wouldn’t call him at home with the complaint. The contact would come on his office phone. They wouldn’t email to initiate an investigation; it would be a phone call. Also, Alex would have 60 days to report it, which meant Charles wouldn’t be able to relax for the next two months because every phone call could mean the end of his career. The gratitude plank about his meaningful career could splinter any time before Christmas. Merry Christmas.

But at least there wasn’t a photo of him grimacing in agony getting beamed around the world. One must take one’s victories where one could.

“At least you can’t see my face,” Charles said, handing the phone back to Erik.

“I studied human kinesiology when we were designing better animatronics, and I have emergency medical responder training,” Erik said, apropos of nothing.

“That’s interesting,” Charles said politely. Were they trying to one-up each other with breadth of knowledge rather than just depth? This happened at faculty functions every so often, except it was usually things like announcing you were training as a classical pianist, or had volunteered to teach chiaroscuro techniques to the homeless.

“What I’m trying to say is that, if you want, I could check your shoulder and give you my opinion about whether you should go to a clinic tonight, or if it wouldn’t hurt to wait a few days to see a doctor.”

“Yes, well, have a go if you want,” Charles said lightly, trying to conceal his self-consciousness.

Erik pulled over one of the dinner table chairs to Charles’ right side, and then cleared his throat. “I, um, need to see your shoulder.”

“Oh, right.” Charles unbuttoned his cardigan. Before he could try and shrug out of it, Erik lifted the sweater away, leaving his right shoulder and most of his chest bare. Charles tugged on the half of the cardigan he was still wearing in an effort to cover some of his chest, nervous at being so exposed, and tried to concentrate on the vanity at his muscle tone rather than the self-consciousness of being medically examined by his celebrity crush. 

“No bruising or discoloration,” Erik said. “I want to check for swelling.”

Then he waited.

“Go ahead,” Charles said.

“I need to see your other shoulder to compare them,” Erik pointed out.

“Oh, right.” Charles let go of where he was pinning his cardigan to his ribs. Erik pushed the rest of the cardigan off his good shoulder and Charles sat there, essentially half-naked to the waist, and tried to think about gene sequencing to distract himself from blushing. He was blushing. Perhaps it was just his ears. Perhaps the blush hadn’t traveled all the way down to his chest the way it did sometimes. Perhaps Erik wouldn’t notice because he was studying Charles’ shoulders instead of watching just how far down Charles could blush. Damn his pale skin.

Erik reached out and pressed gently on both of Charles’ shoulders. “Oh, it’s muscle tone, not swelling. Do you mind if I check the tendons?”

There was a chance he would pull that line out and fondle it whenever he needed cheering up for the rest of the decade. “Yeah, go ahead.”

Cool fingers pressed into his shoulder and pressed in a pattern all the way around the joint. “I’m going to press here while you move your arm. Go ahead.”

Charles moved his arm forward, which didn’t hurt, but moving backward ran into the chair, and he couldn’t move his arm outward at all without hitching it up over the arm of the chair, which he already knew hurt like fire. “The chair is in the way for anything else.”

“Mm.” There was a shriek of bending metal, and the arm and back of Charles’ chair peeled away like an orange.

“What the fuck!”

“I’ll put it back when we’re done,” Erik said, a bit puzzled at Charles’ outburst. The bug on the plate was incomprehensibly outraged that half the plate had just disappeared.

“You’d better! That’s custom work!”

“Move your arm, Charles.”

Charles complied, wincing when Erik’s fingers dug into the joint.

“Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“Charles, I’m trying to see how bad the injury is. Keeping a stiff upper lip defeats the purpose.”

“Fine, it hurts like all fuck.”

“That’s better.”

“Sadist.” 

“I heard that.”

“I meant you to.”

The bug on the plate apparently needed to get smacked upside the head and lectured about its bad attitude. Charles scowled back at him, even as the metal of his chair shrieked as it bent back into its customary shape.

Erik settled Charles’ cardigan around his shoulders again, and Charles didn’t bother fastening the one button, in case Erik wanted to comment on his muscle tone again.

“I don’t think it will cause a problem if you wait a few days to see the doctor. Ibuprofen and a cold pack until then.” Erik walked over and started rummaging in Charles’ freezer. He came back with a bag of peas.

“I didn’t know I owned peas.”

Erik checked the peas’ expiration date. “You have been a pea owner for two years now.”

“That’s not possible. I only live here during the school year.”

“Clean your freezer out next spring before you leave.” Erik sat down and settled the bag of old and frozen peas against Charles’ shoulder.

Charles could have offered to hold the bag of peas himself, but then Erik wouldn’t sit quite so close. The clock ticked, and Erik held the bag of peas on his shoulder, and Charles wondered if Erik was the sort of guy to hit on a guy in a wheelchair, or if Charles would have to take the initiative. 

“What time do you catch the bus into campus in the morning?” Erik asked.

“The 8:10. But I hope you aren’t going to inconvenience yourself on my account.” Damn it, Erik was supposed to be thinking about kissing him, not about helping him.

Erik huffed out an annoyed grunt and narrowed his eyes. He set the bag of peas onto the table. “I’m not meeting you on the bus to help you tomorrow morning. Not at all. Not one iota of concern. No, I’m going to spend all night thinking of why you’re wrong about social evolution and and crush your position on the bus ride into university tomorrow, even if I have to follow you all the way to your office to do it.”

“Well, thanks for the warning. I’ll have my counter-arguments ready,” Charles replied coolly.

Something changed in Erik’s expression, first softening as if the bug on the plate were an exotic butterfly sitting on Versace china, and then getting possessive, as if Erik collected bugs on plates, and he fully intended to have this one for his own. A thrill shot down Charles’ spine and spread out into his lap.

“Are you going to stay up all night thinking about them?” Erik asked. 

“All night,” Charles promised.

Erik grunted, that steady look measuring Charles for his display case. Then he unfolded his arms and picked up the bag of peas from off the table and set it back on Charles’ shoulder. 

Charles wasn’t going to be a medical project any longer. He took the bag of peas from Erik and tossed it back on the table. Then froze at the feeling of Erik’s fingers close to his face. Erik lightly traced the wave of Charles’ hair, and tucked a lock behind his ear, the touch as light as a whisper.

“You’re different than I thought you would be,” Erik said.

That’s the second time Erik had said that. “Sexier?” Charles suggested, emboldened by Erik’s touch.

“Crabbier,” Erik corrected him. Erik's voice was warm, as if sexy and crabby were synonyms.

“Oh. I might have deserved that.”

“You do. And before you snipe at me for trying to help you tomorrow evening too, I’ll tell you that the only reason I’m coming home with you tomorrow night is because I’ve left my dinner in your fridge.”

Charles’ witty comeback was snuffed out when Erik ran that finger down his hair again, then trailed it along Charles’ scruffy jawline. Erik’s gaze was pouring warm honey all over that poor bug, trapping it on the plate while the honey overflowed onto the table.

“That’s . . . an acceptable reason,” Charles said, his voice husky.

The smile lines around Erik’s eyes deepened. 

Charles looked down and away from Erik’s gaze, not bothering to try and button his cardigan to hide the blush that had gone all the way down to his ribs.

“Good night, Charles,” Erik said standing up and retrieving his jacket from where he’d draped it over a chair.

“Good night, Erik. And, um, well, thank you.” Charles hadn’t stammered like this in years.

“I’d say you’re welcome, but you’d probably crab at me. I’ll let myself out.”

Just that fast, Erik was gone.

He left behind a bag of peas slowly thawing into a puddle of condensation on the table, and a professor who was also slowly thawing into a puddle. 

Really, if you looked at everything together, today hadn’t been so bad after all.


	2. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter starts on the same day as chapter one (October 2019) and covers the same events from Erik's POV. It then continues to early January 2020.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many many thanks to @turtletotem for her feedback!

Not only were the graduate students in the Nanoparticle Applications in Solid State Physics seminar old enough to know better, but Erik had warned them on the first day of classes what would happen if he caught someone on a phone and ignoring lecture. Ergo, no further warning was necessary. Erik reached out with his power, not even pausing in his explanation of how inelastic light interacts with nanoparticles, and plucked the phone out of Allerdyce’s hand.

“Oh, shit! I’m sorry, Mr. Lehnsherr.”

“I’m sure you are. Shall we see what is so fascinating you couldn’t wait until after you had recorded the photonic switch results?” Erik had learned that a little humiliation went a long way in teaching proper social skills.

Allerdyce slumped down in his seat and sighed. Erik (secretly) gave him points for not groveling.

“It appears you are composing a tweet telling someone she’s a poor excuse for a person and . . . I’m not sure it’s anatomically possible to put a phone in that location, but I’ll trust you made the attempt before making the suggestion. Would you care to explain why you are morally superior to the object of your scorn?” Erik scrolled up in the thread to see the original post while Mr. Allerdyce worked on his unpersuasive response.

“If you put it that way,” Allerdyce trailed off.

Erik let the obvious response go unsaid. The original tweet was a picture of a man fallen mostly out of a wheelchair, tagged with #getwellsoon and #badday and #racefail. It was also tagged with #ProfXavier. 

He remembered Charles Xavier. Azazel had introduced them at the fall faculty opening social, if what he said could be termed an introduction. Erik hadn’t deemed it worthy of a response. Clearly, the man was exaggerating. However, Erik never responded without having all the facts, so he put off replying until he had a chance to talk to Xavier without Azazel’s interference. Unfortunately, Xavier left the social early.

Erik googled him instead. An hour of reading Xavier’s articles was enough to reveal that Azazel’s summary was badly twisted, but there was a kernel of truth to it. Xavier wasn’t someone Erik would ever agree with. Once you started catering to baseline fears, those fears multiplied like rabbits. Xavier’s eloquence in support of his misguided notions irritated Erik.

He ran across Xavier’s TED talk on social evolution on YouTube. Xavier called out the Mutant Brotherhood’s thinly disguised social Darwinism and flayed it. Erik had heard all of the progressive liberal babble about humanitarianism before, but Xavier was eloquent enough that he couldn’t dismiss Xavier as easily as he could dismiss other bleeding heart mutants who catered to baseline fears. 

Yes, Erik could concede that if society followed the same principles as biological evolution and allowed natural selection to cull out the weakest members, the result would be tyranny, genocide and destruction, but Erik didn’t think mutations fit well into the argument he was making. Mutants didn’t choose to be mutants, but people could choose to be strong. Erik had left the Brotherhood over its insistence that humans could never be strong enough to survive. Bullshit. Strong, smart and healthy humans had a better shot at survival than some wussy, stupid mutant with a useless mutation like being able to change eyebrow colors.

After watching Xavier’s TED talk twice, Erik wished he’d read the text instead. Was the man so compelling because of his conviction? Or were the arguments that good? He couldn’t possibly be using telepathy to exert any influence through a YouTube video. Besides, Xavier was far too ethical (and too concerned about scaring the baselines) to use his telepathy for any improper purpose. Still, over the next few weeks, Erik found himself wondering about Xavier’s arguments that social evolution couldn’t mimic biological evolution without leading to the downfall of civilization. His conclusions ran counter to some of Erik’s most basic beliefs. Erik was nowhere near as radical as he’d been in his twenties and thirties, but some of those ideas lingered on into his fifties.

That’s why Erik had to keep watching the TED talk again and again. The ideas. And if Erik had to focus on the close-up shots of Xavier, it’s because the camera had zoomed in on the most critical arguments, not that the man had a fascinating mouth. The film editor must have enhanced the color of his eyes as well. Overall, Xavier had an interesting face. It was a pity he was in a wheelchair. 

Erik caught himself at that thought. He wasn’t prejudiced. No. His company, Wir Bauen Alles, GmbH, complied with all the EU’s disability access regulations. The fact that Erik had never personally been friends with someone who was disabled was due more to the fact that Erik did not have many personal friends rather than any prejudice.

Still.

Erik quit studying the photo of Xavier falling out of his wheelchair. He set Allerdyce’s phone on the lectern and resumed his explanation of how inelastic light scattering assisted in diagnostics.

After Erik returned to his office and dealt with Cecelia Reyes, a post-doc who had some non-stupid ideas about using optical physics in medical imaging, he took a few minutes to focus his power, sending it out to sense the shapes of the metal in the Fu Engineering Building and the neighboring Fairchild Building that housed the Biology Department. He found Xavier’s wheelchair after just a few minutes of scanning the building. So he’d made it safely back to the office. Perhaps the photo made the fall look worse than it was. 

Over the course of the last couple hours left in the afternoon, Erik kept tabs on the wheelchair. Very few classes were scheduled in the late afternoon, so it was no surprise that Xavier’s wheelchair mostly stayed put. At 4:15 p.m., Erik felt Xavier’s wheelchair descending. He must be in an elevator. 

Erik shut down his computer and shrugged into his Archie Shearling wool coat. He intended only to intercept Xavier casually and make sure all was well before nodding politely and making his own way home. 

All was not well. 

Erik stood next to a leafless sycamore tree on Amsterdam Avenue and watched Xavier struggle down the sidewalk with a wheelchair that was clearly not functioning properly. Erik could sense the torsion in the drive wheel. He also wasn’t using his right arm very much. But what to do? The small bit of campus gossip he’d heard about Xavier on a personal level was about his fierce independence. Erik could respect that. Xavier seemed to be doing alright. Not well, but well enough. 

Erik followed Xavier onto the bus, and passed him while Xavier had his head down, setting the locks on his wheels. He settled into a seat and took out his phone.

Once the two of them exited the bus, Xavier from the front ramp and Erik through the rear door, Erik hung back. He had no intention of interfering unless absolutely necessary, though it pained him to watch Xavier’s slow progress down the sidewalk.

Interference became absolutely necessary when Xavier’s struggle to get past an area of sidewalk broken by tree roots threatened to dunk the professor into the slimy gutter. Erik caught the wheelchair before it could fall. Having already revealed his hand, Erik decided that he may as well get the man all the way home. 

It seemed appropriate to talk to him, though the situation was awkward. Erik wasn’t very good at polite conversation, but he knew enough to start with a compliment and then some self-deprecating humor. “You’re optimistic,” Erik stated. “I’ve never understood optimistic people.”

“How did you come to assess my entire personality in the course of our very brief acquaintance?” Xavier replied. 

Erik missed the snap in his voice. “Realistically, anyone should have known that you couldn’t get a wheelchair over that area of the sidewalk.” He pointed at the rough spot that had nearly dunked the professor, then shifted the umbrella back when he noticed Xavier was getting rained on.

“I didn’t have a lot of options, if you want to exercise your astute powers of observation and tell me which part of the sidewalk was passable.”

This time, Erik heard the snap in his voice and wondered what he’d said wrong.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you,” Xavier said. 

A little more tentative now, Erik decided he should offer to help Xavier rather than just taking over his wheelchair again. He also thought some gentle teasing might lighten his mood. 

“I can help you with your chair, if you’re done being optimistic.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Xavier demanded. “I mean, I know you’re a fucking genius, and a metallokinetic magician, and whatever else they write about you in magazine articles, but that doesn’t give you the right to mock me. If you must know, I’ve had a hell of a day, and since when do we have the same bus stop because I would have noticed that some time in the past eight weeks!”

Erik had no idea how to reply to that. He decided to just get Xavier home. Because he’d already told Xavier that he was going to help with his wheelchair, he set off without any further words, towing the man behind him.

“And now you’re kidnapping me?” Xavier yelled at him.

Dammit, no one told him how difficult it would be to try and do a good deed. He whirled and crouched down to talk to Xavier, and that’s what unraveled him. He was ten inches away from those eyes, and they were not retouched by a film editor, they were every bit that blue. They were also full of equal parts anger and pride. And something else. 

At Tatya Rachel’s house one Purim, cousin Greta had broken a vase, one of those blue and white Dresden china vases on a spindly table with a lacy cloth underneath that was meant purely for decoration. Greta apologized profusely, insisting that she’d been trying to move the vase further back onto the middle of the table. Erik had seen the vase before Greta's ill-fated attempt to help. It had been close to the edge. Greta had knocked it off and broken it when she tried to help.

Xavier looked like the vase. Erik’s attempt to help might very well knock him over and shatter him.

Damn. Yet he was already involved and couldn’t abandon the man now.

Xavier didn’t make it easy to help, but Erik had been CEO long enough to know how to handle crabby, scared geniuses. He argued with him. It worked like a charm. It was also more engaging than he’d expected. In person, Xavier’s ideas weren’t quite as irritating. There was more give and take. The argument seemed to settle Xavier’s fear a bit as they ate dinner together.

At that point, Erik offered to check Xavier’s shoulder, which he’d wanted to do since they reached the apartment. Now that Xavier had calmed down, Erik wanted to see how bad the injury was. This was a clinical assessment only, until Erik noticed that Xavier was blushing. Furiously. All the way down past his bare collarbone to a chest that was . . . more attractive than Erik had expected. 

The blush transformed Charles from an injury and a wheelchair into a person. A person who happened to be in a wheelchair and who had been injured, but a person first and an injury second. Erik was ashamed to admit to himself that he’d seen Charles more as a wheelchair and an injury than as a man this evening. Until the blush.

In his research into Charles’ wrongheaded notions, Erik had run across the obligatory personal information. Charles was gay. Clues around the apartment, and the fact that Charles hadn’t called anyone for help, meant he was single. And blushing.

Well.

Erik was 51 and hadn’t been in a relationship for several years now. That had been one of Emma’s instructions for him on this year sabbatical from his company: get laid. Erik hadn’t dignified the suggestion with a response. At his age and in his income bracket, casually getting laid never stayed casual. It led to complications and expectations and eventually embarrassment. 

The blush, the arguments, and that fragility underlying Charles’ crabbiness got to Erik in a way he hadn’t felt in years. That wasn’t fair to Charles. The quickest way to knock the vase off the table would be to raise expectations that he couldn’t fulfill. He made a dignified retreat, after arranging to help Charles again the next day, and then cursed himself all the way home for touching the man’s hair and giving the wrong impression.

At about 3:00 a.m., Erik’s churning thoughts finally settled into place. They were both adults. Charles wasn’t some blushing teenager who would want a ring and a house with a picket fence. The entire Columbia faculty knew that Erik was only here for one year. He could admit he was attracted to Charles, and it appeared the man returned some interest. There was no reason to pretend he didn’t feel things he might feel. Charles was obviously lonely and alone; Erik could help out with that too.

Besides which, Charles was one of the most powerful telepaths in the world. He might be too ethical to bring up something he’d plucked out of Erik’s head without permission, but Erik would feel ridiculous knowing that Charles knew that Erik was attracted to him but thought he was too fragile to risk anything. Charles would likely hate being patronized like that.

The lack of sleep combined with Erik’s basic personality to turn Erik’s attempt to talk things out the next day into a mess.

“If that’s what you meant, then why didn’t you say it like that!” Charles finally yelled.

“Because you’re a telepath!” Erik resorted to saying. No, he wasn’t yelling too, just talking more intensely than usual.

“Despite my telepathy, Erik, I do appreciate a modicum of tact and some attempt to remember that telepaths have ordinary feelings too!” Charles yelled back.

“Look, I didn’t see any reason to pretend that I didn’t notice you were blushing yesterday, and I touched your hair because that kind of got to me.” Erik retreated to the facts.

“Thank you for acknowledging my humanity, if you’ll excuse the term.”

“I didn’t mean,” Erik cast about for words and didn’t find any. “Can you just pull it out of my head? Why the hell are we having an awkward conversation when you can just figure out exactly what I mean and see that I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings?” Erik thought he was making a gentle joke. He was wrong.

Charles swelled up like a puffer fish. He pushed his plate aside and set his fork down with a sharp clink. “First of all, your mind is a terrible muddle of half a million things you may or may not mean at any given time - everyone’s mind is that way - and it is _ not _ my responsibility as a telepath to sort through that mess and decide which meaning I want to believe so as to let you off the hook for being an insensitive lout. Second of all, shoving the emotional work off onto someone else is a terribly lazy thing to do whether or not I’m a telepath. You do the work to figure out how to communicate what you meant; that’s not my job. Third of all, of course you didn’t intend to hurt my feelings but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do something you ought to apologize for!”

Erik felt the force of Charles’ anger pulsing in the air, shot through with cracks like a Dresden vase being knocked off the table.

“Whatever I said to upset you, I’m sorry,” Erik said.

Charles picked up his fork and Erik sent out just a twitch of his power to deflect it in case Charles threw it at him.

“You figure out what you said and apologize for it! You don’t get to issue a blanket apology without any understanding behind it!”

Charles did not throw the fork.

“Thanks for not throwing the fork,” Erik said.

Charles slammed the fork down onto the table and wheeled away, his right arm motionless in his lap and his left arm doing all the work. It would have been a more dramatic exit if he’d had somewhere to go besides the living area a few feet away. He stopped with his back to Erik. Those gorgeous shoulders slumped a bit.

The hell of it was that Erik knew damn well what he’d said to upset Charles so much. He hated apologizing though. If it wasn’t for the cracks in the vase, he would have stomped out of the apartment to avoid the awkwardness.

“I said it like I was doing you a favor to be interested in you,” Erik said.

The gorgeous shoulders straightened and Charles turned his head so he was in three-quarter profile instead of facing entirely away.

“I noticed you were blushing and it made me see you in a different way, and I said I might be interested in you like you should thank me for being interested.”

“And?” Charles prodded.

“And what?”

“Are you sorry!”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Erik rubbed his forehead.

“Fine. Do you want to play chess?”

The change of subject was abrupt enough that Erik got the message: no talking about their mutual attraction. 

They played chess. 

“I’m taking the bus into campus tomorrow morning,” Erik said after the chess game as he got ready to leave.

“Good for you.”

“I meant I’ll see you on the bus tomorrow morning,” Erik clarified.

“Yes, I expect if we’re on the same bus, we’ll see each other,” Charles said.

“I meant,” Erik said, emphasizing each word, “that I’m going to be around if you need to yell at someone who might offer to help you get to your office in the morning.”

“Ah! So you are capable of figuring out what you mean and speaking the words that convey that meaning! Freshman Composition 101 has finally taken hold!”

Erik stormed out of the apartment, wondering if the urge to shake Charles would lessen with time.

***

The urge to shake Charles did not lessen with time, though occasionally the motivation changed. They settled into a routine in which Erik came home with Charles after labs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and checked in late Saturday afternoon for errands, dinner and a chess game. Never Wednesdays. Charles had some unspecified commitment on Wednesdays. 

Erik showed up for physical therapy to learn how to help Charles with exercises and stretches. They never talked about Erik’s participation in physical therapy. Charles didn’t say no, and it turned out that most of their best arguments happened while Erik was helping Charles exercise. It was enough for Erik to observe that Charles was always more infuriating when he was scared or in pain. The evening after the physical therapist told Charles it might be four to six months before he got back any significant range of motion in his right shoulder was particularly bad. 

Then mid-December involved an entire string of difficult evenings until Erik demanded to know what was wrong.

“We’re coming up on the 60-day deadline for Alex to report what I did. I could still lose my job,” Charles confessed. The blue cardigan he wore every evening hung crookedly on his shoulders, exposing his right pec entirely. Erik kept sneaking glances. 

“What did you do?” Erik asked, genuinely puzzled. He couldn’t picture Charles doing anything that could get him fired.

“I can’t tell you because you’re a professor too. You have an obligation to report me,” Charles said. They were watching a documentary on the brain on Netflix. Charles had consulted on the segment in episode four about genetic abnormalities affecting brain function.

“Too bad I’m not the telepath, because the curiosity is going to kill me,” Erik growled.

“I do _ not _ use telepathy to satisfy my idle curiosity!”

Charles always snapped back when Erik tried to say anything about telepathy. 

There were certain subjects they talked to death: technology, genetics, metallokinesis, stupidity and current events.

There were certain subjects they avoided: injury, disability, relationships, telepathy, sex and fear.

In the discussions about metallokinesis, Erik found himself opening up and talking to Charles about things he’d never talked to anyone about. He talked about his father’s death when Erik was twenty-two and away at a college; his weekly phone calls with his seventy-six-year-old mother in Germany; his growing restlessness as CEO of Wir Bauen Alles that resulted in him teaching at Columbia for a year. They didn’t talk about telepathy, and Charles barely dropped hints about his family. Erik heard a bit about his father dying when Charles was twelve, a bit about his stepfather and stepbrother, a bit about his mother’s alcoholism and quite a lot about Raven. 

Erik decided he would like Raven for being a badass, but he didn’t like her for abandoning her brother. Charles clearly adored her, and it was just as clear that Raven avoided him. In the two months since Charles’ injury, Raven had Skyped exactly twice and apparently believed Charles when he cheerily told her that everything was fine and she shouldn’t worry about him. Erik hated her for that. If Charles wanted to pluck that opinion out of his head, he was welcome to it.

When Raven faked regret about not being able to fly out from L.A. for Christmas and Charles graciously assured her that it didn’t bother him in the slightest, Erik informed Charles that he would be coming over every day of the winter holidays. 

Charles grunted in reply.

“Unless you say no,” Erik said.

“Well, there’s no point in you going back and forth every day when I’ve got a guest bedroom. Stay there,” Charles said instead. The deadline that had worried Charles so much had apparently expired without any issues arising, so some days he was downright polite.

***

Erik arrived with a plastic menorah to set on the smaller window sill. The larger window was dominated by a Christmas tree that Charles had paid someone to put up.

On the first evening of the winter break, a dark and cold December evening, Erik had his hand stretched out, muscles tense as Charles pressed down on his hand. “I would do my physical therapy even if you spent the holiday in Germany with your mother,” Charles chided him. He put his arm through the rotating stretches that were slowly building back up his range of motion.

“I’m not here just for the physical therapy,” Erik said.

“I didn’t think you were,” Charles replied.

Erik looked at him sideways and caught Charles’ impish grin. He smiled in response and Charles ducked his head shyly, his chin-length hair sweeping into his face. There were moments when Erik thought that maybe they might be able to talk about their mutual attraction again. But if they talked it out, they might stop arguing and Erik dearly loved arguing. Or Erik might fuck it up again, and the thought scared him.

A few days later, when Charles figured out that Erik had memorized certain lines from his TED talk, Erik brushed it off.

“You have an interesting turn of phrase. It stuck in my head like a burr. Irritating.”

“Mm-hmm,” Charles said, studying the chess board. 

“The equality of sharing a planet turns humanitarianism into justice and not altruism,” Erik quoted at him. “We are not to congratulate ourselves for being kind when all we do is work to level off the inequality of accidental circumstances.” 

“Exactly!” Charles said, as if Erik were agreeing with him. “Altruism is so irritating. Why do people believe they should be admired when they distribute resources they never should have gotten in the first place?”

“We have to let people fight and work to get those resources, Charles. You weaken the species by handouts. Do I have to bring up how it kills a butterfly to open its cocoon for it?” Erik countered. 

“Do I have to bring up how starvation and disease are not cocoons that turn people into butterflies?” Charles countered right back. 

The argument escalated from there until they were shouting at each other over the chess board about things like altruism and social responsibility. It was odd how Erik never tired of the argument, never tired of watching Charles insist on the interconnectedness of everyone on this sad little planet. He wanted to ask how Charles felt about being a billionaire, but he enjoyed arguing about the principles too much.

As the argument wound down, Erik said, “You know, sometimes I turn off the volume on your TED talk on YouTube so I can watch you without listening to your infuriating arguments.”

Charles blinked. “Was that a compliment?”

Erik shrugged. “About as close as I get.” Then he put Charles in checkmate.

The more he argued with Charles about the strength necessary to survive, the more the thought nagged at him that Dresden vases weren’t strong, but he would do anything necessary to keep the vase from shattering.

***

Charles had a nice guest bedroom. If Erik didn’t already know that Charles was a billionaire, he would have guessed by the size of his apartment. No one got 1,600 square feet in Manhattan without nine or ten zeros in the bank balance. Charles told Erik that the guest room was for Raven when she came to visit. Erik removed the creepy modern art from the walls without asking permission so he could get to sleep without picturing himself smacking Raven for never using the room.

“That loo is the size of a phone booth, though,” Erik commented the first night he stayed over.

Charles gave him a wicked grin. “You’re the only house guest I’ve ever had who is old enough to make that comparison.”

Erik crushed him at chess that evening in retribution. 

They spent enough time laughing and trash talking each other that the moment when they said good night and went into separate rooms wasn’t even awkward. Erik brushed his teeth in the tiny bathroom. The master bathroom, completely kitted out for a wheelchair user, shared a wall with Erik’s bathroom. He could hear Charles moving around, the gadgets whirring. Erik traced the warmth from Charles’ hands on the assistance railings and basically stood there tracking Charles’ evening bathroom routine with his power before remembering that Charles was a telepath and was likely watching Erik watch him. 

Charles was so adamant about not responding to anything that Erik didn’t verbalize that Erik occasionally toyed with the idea of seeing how far he could go with outrageous thoughts before Charles would call him out. Then he realized he didn’t want to outrage Charles. Not really. Just enough for an argument, but not enough to risk genuinely offending him. There was something important and fragile weaving itself into a connection between them. Now there were two Dresden vases: Charles himself, and the growing connection between them.

***

Erik knew he got up earlier than Charles even before he spent the winter break with him, but it still amused him that he could get up, go workout for an hour, come home, shower and fix breakfast before Charles emerged. He would set a mug of tea on the table and think loudly about Charles’ mussed hair and sleepy eyes until Charles scowled at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me you take your tea with sugar?” Erik asked after several days.

“How did you find out I like tea with sugar?” Charles countered.

“Your housekeeper.”

Erik had pictured the winter holiday as two weeks alone with Charles, but it turned out Charles had an entire team of people that Erik had never met since he’d usually visited only in the evenings. Besides the physical therapist whom Erik already knew, there was a housekeeper, the personal assistant who ran errands and the disabled children in the hospital that Charles visited weekly. Plus, he had takeaway and shopping delivered. Charles knew names, family members, current concerns and something nice about everyone.

“You understand Italian but you can’t speak it?” Erik asked one evening after Charles spent ten minutes chatting with the Door Dash guy before tipping him $100 in cash.

Charles gave that apologetic shrug that signaled a confession about telepathy. “Italians think in pictures and gestures as much as words. I can get the gist from his thoughts. I can make him understand what I want to convey as well, even though I’m speaking English.” 

Erik shook his head in affectionate exasperation.

Charles smiled.

Erik hadn’t tried to live with anyone since Magda back in his mid-thirties. It surprised him how comfortable it was to slip into a routine with Charles. The two weeks of winter holiday passed more quickly than Erik had thought possible. He’d brought a laptop and intentions to work on some designs that Emma had emailed him for review, but somehow there was never time to really dive into work. It didn’t matter. Emma probably preferred that he slack off so she could tease him about why he couldn’t concentrate on work. It turned out that Emma and Charles knew each other (some sort of Mensa society for telepaths) and mutual gossip informed Emma of all the time Erik was spending with Charles.

Erik celebrated New Year’s Eve by falling asleep on Charles’ couch. Charles threw a pillow at him to wake him up for the ball drop in Times Square. 

“Are we going to kiss at midnight?” Erik asked with a sleepy yawn.

“Come over and find out,” Charles replied, and then drained his glass. He poured himself more champagne and filled a second glass for Erik.

Erik had fantasies of picking Charles up out of that chair and setting him on his lap on the couch for a proper makeout session. He had never once seen Charles get out of his wheelchair, even though there was a strap attached to the ceiling over one end of the couch that was clearly installed to help him transfer to the couch. Erik assumed he didn’t use it because of his shoulder injury. And he would never _ ever _dare ask if he could pick up Charles. That didn’t stop him from thinking about it though.

At Charles’ invitation, Erik shifted over to the armchair and Charles wheeled himself closer. They started the countdown together, but Charles brought their lips together on ‘four.’ The kiss was . . . nice. Erik had his head tipped awkwardly. He set a hand on Charles’ shoulder but couldn’t get an arm around his back. Charles flickered a tongue against his lips and then drew back.

“Happy New Year,” Erik said.

“Happy New Year. May 2020 bring you happiness,” Charles replied.

“2020 is off to a good start,” Erik said. He took the champagne glass Charles handed him. They clinked and sipped.

“Yeah. Go get some sleep, Erik, you’re a grump when you stay up too late.”

So there weren’t fireworks at their first kiss. Outside, Erik heard noisemakers and a few celebratory explosions. Charles wheeled himself to the sideboard to retrieve a napkin for no reason Erik could see. The other night, Erik had googled ‘sex with a paraplegic’ and spent an hour reading websites and thinking very loudly. He hadn’t said anything, and Charles was continuing his obnoxious insistence on not responding to Erik’s thoughts unless he voiced them. Erik let his thoughts wander over Charles’ body.

Charles took a loud breath and almost said something. But then he didn’t.

***

The last night before Erik moved back to his own apartment and classes started again, Erik turned on NBC New York so they could gripe about current events together. It was one of their favorite pastimes. Charles parked his wheelchair next to the couch and they entertained each other by adding hashtags to everything the news anchor said. It was something Charles heard his students do. Tonight’s hashtag category was movies that were older than their students. Whoever came up with a movie first got a point. Charles was ahead.

“Hashtag Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” Erik said after the segment about Zuckerberg’s latest failure to demonstrate any clue about business ethics.

“Hashtag Beauty and the Beast,” Charles said when the newscaster announced an upcoming younger actress had gotten engaged to a man twice her age.

“That just came out!” Erik objected.

“The original one, Erik, not the remake.”

“We need rules about remakes.”

“We have a rule about remakes. As long as the original movie is older than our students, we can use it,” Charles said.

“You just made that up.”

“Hashtag Revenge of the Nerds.”

“What?”

“That story about the high school boy's science fair project. Pay attention. That’s another point for me.”

“Hashtag Rudy”

“That was about figure skating!”

“Any heartwarming sports story can be hashtagged Rudy. That’s a rule now too,” Erik informed Charles.

“You just made that up.”

“Yeah, middle-aged people can do that too,” Erik replied.

“I’m middle-aged, you’re old.”

“Not.”

“You’re 51. Like you plan to live to 102? You’re past middle-age, Erik.”

“Hashtag Armageddon.”

“That has nothing to do with the weather forecast!”

“Asteroids come from the sky like snow,” Erik pointed out.

“Are we doing this hashtag thing right?”

“I don’t know. Ask one of your students. Oh look, another virus from China,” Erik said as the newscast moved on to a segment about a string of deaths in Wuhan, China. “Hashtag Contagion.”

“That movie is younger than our students. Hashtag Outbreak and the point goes to me. How worrisome,” Charles said, that dent appearing between his eyebrows.

“It won’t be any worse than swine flu,” Erik said with a shrug. “Come on, one last chess game before I move out and give you some peace and quiet.” 

“Hashtag Sunset Boulevard.”

“Now that’s just rude.”


	3. Moving In

MID-MARCH 2020

“They closed the borders with Austria and France, Erik. Airports are turning into airplane parking lots. You can teach online classes from Germany if you really care that much about your new teaching hobby. Get home now!” Emma said firmly and yet without a scowl through Skype. A scowl might cause wrinkles, and Emma’s skin would not tolerate wrinkles. Her blonde hair had turned ice white one weekend not long after her fiftieth birthday but she could otherwise still pass for forty.

“If it was anyone else, I would think you were worried about my health,” Erik said. The coronavirus case count in New York City was multiples higher than the case count in Germany. Erik didn’t want to talk to Emma about why he was reluctant to leave New York because she already teased him enough about Charles. 

“I haven’t seen your will yet, sugar. I need you alive until you tell me I inherit the company.”

Emma had a way of saying things that ought to be a joke in a way that made you doubt they were really a joke.

“I saw the financials. I knew you’d keep up with my profit margins,” Erik said. Leaving Emma as acting CEO had paid off well. “I saw your report on retooling production for medical equipment. How much lead time would we need to roll that out?”

“We’re already rolling it out, Erik. Italy needed ventilators yesterday. And I surpassed your profit margin.”

Erik gallantly ignored arguing with Emma about a quarter point on the financials. “Good. Hold a few dozen in reserve. We might need them in New York.”

“I’ll trade. New York can have 3 dozen ventilators and we get you.”

“I’m truly touched, Emma.” The fastest way to get Emma to cut the shit and say what was on her mind was to threaten her with tender emotions.

It worked.

“I’m leaving, Erik. I’m getting out of Berlin before someone decides to close the city borders.”

Erik did not see that coming. He was also stubbornly holding onto the assumption that the coronavirus wouldn’t affect him very much. “Are you really that worried about the virus? Do you have asthma?” News reports kept saying that the only people in real danger were the elderly and people with underlying health problems.

If Erik wanted to count on the fingers of one hand how many times he had seen Emma look genuinely worried before today, he would have to close his fist. “It’s the psionic load that worries me. I can already feel the fear intensifying. You know how the air gets heavier before a bad storm? Like that, only with fear.”

“But your mental shields.”

“Shields can’t keep out fear on this level with an entire city synchronizing their feelings.”

“Are you sure?” Erik asked.

That bit of stupidity allowed Emma to wipe the fear from her face and replace it with that arrogance that was so familiar and comforting. “No, sugar, I’ve just decided to uproot my life and live in the woods like Bigfoot because I think it will be good for my complexion.”

“Right, yeah, are all the telepaths leaving?”

“I don’t think anyone less powerful than Theta level will be affected,” Emma said. “Empaths too. But yes, there’s an exodus from densely populated areas going on.”

Erik wondered if he should ask the next question. He wished Emma was in the same room so she could just pluck it out of his head. Charles was so infuriating about making Erik say things out loud before he would answer. It robbed Erik of plausible deniability when he wanted to avoid responsibility for thinking something gauche. Emma was willing to trade barbs with him and then he could say he hadn’t actually said anything that rude.

Emma asked the question instead. “Charles isn’t leaving, is he?”

“Some stupid egalitarian shit about how most people can’t evacuate to second homes in the countryside so he shouldn’t either,” Erik said with a sigh.

"How's your mother?"

Erik was surprised that Emma knew he had a mother. "She told me she wasn't expecting me back right now and she'd put me in quarantine if I tried to charter a private jet anyway." Erik didn't add the other reason his mother didn't want him to come back - she wanted to see him happily in a relationship and thought Charles was Erik's last hope. It was embarrassing to have his mother lecture him about his love life at his age.

“I guess we’ll see you back here when this is all over then.”

“Yeah, it shouldn’t be much later than early summer before everything is back to normal.”

“Oh sugar.” Emma pinched the bridge of her nose and ended the call.

* * *

Charles was on FaceTime with Moira when he felt Erik’s mind approaching his apartment door. “I’m about to be invaded and I may need to call you back.”

“We’re pretty much done. Charles, I know how much you want to help and in normal times I’d raise the roof about excluding you.”

“Yes, I know,” Charles tossed off breezily. “It was just a casual question. I’ll be fine doing data analysis from the comfort of my dining room table.”

Charles couldn’t wear the full containment suits that Irving Medical was requiring all of its research doctors to wear when working with the coronavirus. With his injured shoulder, he couldn’t get into the suit without help. His physical therapist put his recovery at about 70% and that simply wasn’t enough for the strength and contortions required to get into full hazmat gear while sitting in a wheelchair. Besides, as Hank pointed out, he was a geneticist and not an epidemiologist. He’d do better analyzing the data rather than gathering it in the lab. 

Hank was in the lab 18 hours a day.

“Don’t wear yourself out. Give your students the rest of the semester off if you have to,” Moira said. Charles could hear her son in the background. Moira had moved the campus legal office to her living room.

“Not an option! We’re all set up with a Zoom classroom. My students are horribly disappointed, but I don’t plan to let them out of my classes without the full level of knowledge their outrageous tuition demands.” Charles smiled widely.

The deadbolt unlocked and the doorknob turned. Charles could feel the mental tingle of Erik’s power.

“Is Erik there?” Moira asked.

“How do you know it’s Erik?”

“We’ve texted a few times. I’ll let you go. Bye Charles!”

She was off the call before Charles could follow up on what exactly Moira and Erik had been texting about, though judging by the suitcases and boxes following Erik in through the door, he had a pretty good guess.

“What are you doing here?” Charles said by way of greeting.

Erik’s computer equipment floated over to the opposite end of the dining room table. He set the cardboard box he’d been carrying on the floor. There was a roll of toilet paper on the top.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get mugged for that,” Charles added, pointing at the toilet paper.

“Criminals have an affinity for metal weapons. I rather enjoy being mugged.”

“You would.”

“The lockdown order means I can’t go back and forth anymore. So here I am,” Erik said, and then had the gall to look nervous about his welcome. “You can tell me to leave if you want.”

“Are you here because you think I can’t take care of myself?” Charles demanded angrily. Despite his assurances to Moira, it still stung that he couldn’t suit up and help work with the actual virus.

“No, actually, I’m hoping one of us succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome in the next couple of weeks.”

“Are you the captor or the prisoner?” Charles asked haughtily. Having your celebrity crush move into your life had been trickier than Charles had expected. He tried not to make the same mistakes that had driven Raven away. He didn’t talk about how afraid he was sometimes; he never answered any of Erik’s thoughts unless he spoke them aloud; he didn’t admit how much he needed to have someone around. Erik kept coming back, so Charles figured he was doing something right.

“Ah! So you like role-playing! I knew I’d get to your naughty side eventually.” 

Erik had entirely too many teeth sometimes. He knelt down by Charles’ wheelchair, all those teeth on display. The bug on the plate was about to get eaten alive. Honestly, the bug didn’t mind too much. 

Charles wrapped a hand around the back of Erik’s head and leaned in to the kiss. Erik’s dry thin lips were tentative and exploratory at first. Charles reined in his urge to force a filthy sloppy kiss on him and let Erik set the pace. 

For a minute. 

Then Charles got sick of the way Erik acted like he was breakable and he wrapped the second hand around Erik’s head and took over the kiss. The heat flare from Erik’s mind coated both of them as Charles thrust and licked and nibbled. Erik’s hand stroked down Charles’ neck to his bare chest and rubbed his nipple. Charles let go of Erik’s mouth to kiss down his jawline and then stopped with his forehead against Erik’s neck.

“Are we going to talk about . . . this?” Charles finally asked Erik’s collarbone.

“This?”

“Us.”

“I suck at relationships,” Erik admitted.

“Ah, so we do have something in common. I suppose we can build from there.”

Erik pulled away with a laugh. Charles laughed with him. And for one bright and beautiful moment, all was right with the world.


	4. Week One

Erik argued hard and fast about the need to use the lab equipment in his graduate seminars and got permission from Columbia to broadcast from the lab. The only two people in the lab were himself and Cecilia Reyes; the rest of the class linked up through Zoom. Erik taught and Cecilia handled the camera work. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. 

After labs, Erik spent an hour or two talking to Cecilia and about adapting the nanoparticle diagnostic testing already used for the flu to develop a more efficient and cheaper test for Covid19. The test would measure antibodies, so they would need to find people who had already recovered from Covid19 and get some blood samples. He emailed a synopsis of her ideas to Emma with all of Cecelia’s contact information. Emma was no longer in Berlin, but she would know who could best jump on the idea.

He caught an Uber after class, wondering when rideshares would be shut down. The driver dropped him off a couple blocks from Charles’ apartment because Erik wanted to look for food staples. Charles’ pantry was pathetic. He didn’t even have oatmeal and the pasta was so old it was crumbling. Those damned peas in the freezer were indicative of how little attention Charles paid to keeping edible food in the house. The man lived on takeaway. 

The only canned food left on the store shelf was garbanzo beans. Erik had no idea how to eat garbanzo beans but he figured they could google a recipe if they got that desperate. There were oranges, but no apples. He stopped at the deli, waited in line for an hour, and tried to buy 8 sandwiches, figuring the extras could join the damned peas in the freezer. They limited him to four.

Once he got back to Charles’ apartment, he discovered that Charles had managed to get Italian delivered. He felt a funny little clutch in his chest when Charles looked up from the table and smiled at him in greeting. After just a few days of living with Charles, Erik wondered how he’d managed to live alone for so long.

Erik put all four sandwiches in the freezer in the new tupperware containers he’d paid $100 for on eBay with expedited shipping. Charles also didn’t have tupperware. Erik had never met anyone less ready for the apocalypse. He should be appalled and instead he just found it endearing.

The dining room table was covered on one end by Charles’ research and class notes and on the other end by Erik’s computer and files. They ate ravioli and green salad at the counter, which had been lowered to accommodate Charles’ wheelchair. There was even cannoli. Erik enjoyed every luxurious meal because the next one might be garbanzo beans and peas with freezer burn.

“How are the Zoom classes?” Erik asked.

“I hate Zoom. I can’t feel any minds! It’s as bad as text messaging,” Charles complained.

“Is that why you don’t answer any of my texts?”

“Texts are totally soulless. You don’t even get punctuation, much less any emotional interaction.”

“What if I send you a smiley emoji?”

They chatted about the inconveniences and adaptations to teleworking and social distancing. New York City was marching closer to taking over as the epicenter of the pandemic. News and social media sites were saturated with stories of people coming down with Covid19 and tips for treatment and avoidance, some sounding dodgier than others. Erik wanted to ask Charles about his mental shields, thinking about what Emma had said about the psionic load of a city full of synchronized feelings, but didn’t want to bring up a touchy subject.

Erik decided to bring up the other touchy subject.

“So it’s Wednesday,” Erik said.

“So it is,” Charles replied.

“You never want me to come over on Wednesdays,” Erik pointed out.

“We survived two Wednesdays together over winter break,” Charles said.

“What’s special about Wednesdays, Charles?”

Charles shrugged, chasing down the last bit of dressing-soaked cheese on his plate.

Erik let it go. Charles cleaned up dinner while Erik checked his email again. Departmental policies were evolving by the hour, and he was worried that Columbia would rescind his permission to teach from the lab. If that happened, he would essentially have to shut down his graduate seminar.

“Everyone has an embarrassing quirk, don’t you think?” Charles said, wheeling out of the kitchen and back to the dining room table. He picked up a highlighter and turned it over and over.

“I don’t,” Erik said absently, absorbed in Johann’s report on the cost of retooling their production facilities to make ventilators.

“I’m sure you do. Do you want to confess it voluntarily, or should I read your mind and find out?”

Erik looked up, eyebrow raised. Charles had never threatened to read his mind before. Then he grinned widely. “This is about your Wednesday night vigil that always excludes me, isn’t it? It’s embarrassing? Is that what you’re saying?”

“You can confess your embarrassing quirk and we can blackmail each other into mutual silence like gentlemen, or I can find out anyway and the mutual-silence blackmail becomes less amicable,” Charles said loftily.

“Amicable blackmail?”

“It’s possible.”

“Some days I’m astounded you have so many friends,” Erik said.

“Well, I don’t have to blackmail most of them!”

“I’m special?” Erik suggested.

“You’re here and unavoidable. Answer faster, would you? It’s almost 7:00.”

“I have no embarrassing quirks,” Erik insisted. “Truth. Read my mind if you want.”

Charles pursed his lips and that dent appeared between his eyebrows. “Fine. But if you mock me, you will spend the next week convinced that you’re a St. Bernard puppy with a bad case of anal worms and I will record you, turn it into a gif and tweet it out to the world.”

Erik had never heard a more threatening threat in his life, and he had once failed to tell Emma that she had broccoli in her teeth before a presentation.

“I swear not to mock you.”

“Liar.” Charles wheeled over to the couch and used the ceiling strap to neatly transfer himself onto the couch. He picked up the TV remote and turned on the television.

Apparently Charles’ embarrassing quirk involved the television. Erik logged out of his computer and joined him on the couch, catching the end of a news broadcast that segued into a PSA about washing your hands and social distancing. “I’ve seen a few episodes of _ Big Bang Theory.” _

“Not embarrassing,” Charles replied.

The interesting thing about Charles was how many facets to his personality he had. There was the man who genuinely cared about the details of the people who delivered his meals and cleaned his apartment. There was the man who tried his hardest to connect with his students and teach them to love learning, not just learn facts. There was the man who would work his ass off to be as independent as possible even when he could really use some help. Then there was the man who got crabby when he was scared, who argued with Erik rather than talk about a relationship and who was defensive about apparently liking a TV show. Charles didn’t put on a facade, but he had several facets. Erik concluded he was about to find out another facet - the one that liked an embarrassing TV show.

Charles was in profile, watching commercials. Erik reached over and tucked a lock of tousled chin-length hair behind his ear, trailing his fingers down Charles’ shoulder and that cable-knit blue cardigan he knew so well by now. Blue like a Dresden china vase. Charles didn’t seem to be on the edge as much anymore, not now that his shoulder was healing at such a steady pace. At the touch, Charles turned and smiled at Erik, then shifted himself closer. Erik put an arm around his shoulders and Charles leaned against him. Erik fit his fingers around Charles’ wrist and stroked his palm.

“Stockholm Syndrome affection?” Charles asked lightly.

Erik was about to say something sizzling hot, but at that exact second, the theme music gave way to the title card. He was about to watch an episode of “The Bachelorette.” His comment died in his throat, but not before reaching up to his brain stem and taking a few brain cells with it. 

Banned from mocking, Erik cast about desperately for something else to say. He eventually ended up typing “say something serious about the bachelorette” into his phone.

Siri failed him.

Because he had his arm around Charles, Charles was watching his phone. “Just enjoy it, Erik. Eye candy. Luke has the best chest, but Tristan’s biceps are to die for. Ronan has the best hair if you like blondes; Jed has naturally curly hair. I don’t like Colton’s sense of humor, but he has the best table manners. I seriously did not know how hard it was to eat pasta until Pete butchered the Italian fantasy date night.”

“Is that really a tandem bike?”

“Shh, don’t talk.”

Erik respectfully waited until the commercial break before speaking. “What the holy fuck, Charles?”

Charles twisted around to look up at him and grinned. “Fun, right?”

“Okay,” Erik said, pained. 

“Shut up, Erik.”

Erik watched The Bachelorette. If he thought of it as an observation of the mating rituals of a socially complex species that could be broadcast on Animal Planet with commentary voice over, it was really kind of interesting. Besides which, he had Charles pressed up against him, absently massaging his fingers. Erik would have put up with a lot more for the sake of finally having Charles next to him like this. He’d never really noticed before how sensuous a hand massage could be. Charles must know exactly what he was suggesting by stroking Erik’s fingers and tickling his palm. Erik was fully ready to do his part once he could get Charles’ undivided attention.

After Elisa handed out roses and Tristan and Aaron spoke gallantly about their disappointment, Charles handed Erik the remote. “Do you need to watch a documentary as a form of mental CPR now?”

Erik switched to the History Channel and turned the volume down on the documentary about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic to a low buzz. He set the remote down, shifted to bring Charles more fully into his arms and commenced nuzzling his hair. “You’ve got better hair than Ronan and I’d rather look at your chest than Luke’s.”

Charles turned his head. Erik obligingly went from nuzzling Charles’ hair to brushing lips down his cheek and into his beard, forcing Charles’ head up to kiss down his neck. At this point, Erik would be typically manhandling his partner into a better position, but he knew enough to worry about accidentally wrenching a muscle in Charles’ back.

“We’re going to end up in a bed together tonight, Charles. Give me some hints on how to make this good for you.”

Charles, who had been melting into Erik, stiffened and pulled away. “Let’s focus on making this good for you instead. That’s easier.”

Erik let go of Charles’ waist and ran his hands down Charles’ arms, efficiently sliding him out of the blue cardigan and baring Charles to the waist. “I’m not a selfish lover.”

“I didn’t say you were. But I want to talk about you first. I’ve got certain . . . limitations.”

“Do tell.” Erik slipped out from behind Charles and guided him to lie down on the couch, kneeling over him. He set a hand to where Charles’ neck joined his shoulder. “You like to be touched here.” He slid his hand down to Charles’ chest and gently stroked his nipple. “And here.” With both hands, he traced the edges of Charles’ rib cage and dragged the palm of his hand across Charles’ stomach. “Good?” Charles had his eyes closed and he gave a long exhale. “Good,” Erik concluded. Massaging with both hands, Erik worked his way lower, passing Charles’ belly button and shifting the waistband of his knit pants. “Tell me when it stops being good.”

“Don’t stop,” Charles said, his voice breathy.

Erik smiled smugly, not that Charles could see it with his eyes shut. He slowed down, moving barely a quarter inch lower with each rotation of his palms against Charles’ bare belly. He leaned over Charles, brushing his lips across Charles’ nose and cheeks. Charles finally grabbed his hand just as Erik’s fingers brushed pubic hair.

“That’s . . . all.”

“Doesn't it feel good anymore?” Erik asked, pressing tiny kisses along Charles’ hairline.

“There’s just not any point. I rarely get an erection.”

“Arousal?”

“That’s hormonal and mental and emotional. You’re very arousing, Erik, but I rarely get hard. There’s no point in touching me.”

“I want to touch you if it feels good.”

Charles turned his head into Erik’s kisses, blue eyes an inch away. “It feels good more as a memory. I know what it used to feel like.”

“Was that a yes?”

“Yes,” Charles replied.

Erik shifted to sit more comfortably on the floor, then began with his hand up by Charles’ belly button, slowly working his way lower, watching Charles’ closely. Charles shut his eyes again, so Erik could look all he wanted at Charles with his hair falling over the throw pillow, breathing through parted lips. His breath came a bit faster as Erik moved his hand inside Charles’ pants and cupped his cock and balls. As Erik began to massage his soft genitals, Charles’ tongue flickered out, licking his lips and then biting them. Erik felt himself start to harden, watching Charles’ mouth.

“Do you want me to suck you?” Erik offered.

Charles opened his eyes, the intensity in them jolting through Erik’s blood. “No, but I am going to suck you tonight.”

Erik knelt up, filling his mind with the feel of Charles’ under his hand so Charles could feel how much Erik was savoring this. He hovered his mouth over Charles, waiting. Charles put a hand on the back of Erik’s head and held him there while he licked his lips, slow and wet. 

“Yeah, you’re going to suck me off tonight,” Erik agreed.

“Bed?” Charles suggested.

“I’ll get your wheelchair.” Erik removed his hand from Charles’ pants and turned.

“You want to carry me, don’t you?” Charles propped himself up on his elbows.

Erik nodded, eyes scanning Charles’ body from bare shoulders to toes still in socks.

“Like this then,” Charles said, putting fingers to his temple. 

An image filled Erik’s mind, with careful emphasis on how to support Charles’ back and how to lift him and set him down without twisting him. Erik couldn’t help wondering if Charles had ever let anyone but a medical professional carry him before.

_ No, only you. _

_ I’ll be careful. _

_ I know you will. _

Erik wondered if the two of them would get any closer to saying ‘I love you’ than that, and then decided he didn’t care. After a quick trip to his room to snag the condoms and lube he’d brought, and then a stop in Charles’ bedroom to pull the blankets down, he returned to the couch where Charles had shifted himself to a sitting position. Erik sat next to him and slid one hand under Charles’ knees and put an arm around Charles’ lower back. Charles put both arms around Erik’s neck. With a soft huff of breath, Erik stood with Charles in his arms.

“I’m heavier than you expected, aren’t I?”

“Solid is good. Less breakable,” Erik replied.

Charles grinned down at him. Erik had his arm low enough on Charles’ back that Charles was above him. He stopped halfway through the dining room and fastened his eyes on Charles’ mouth.

Charles bent to Erik’s mouth, tongue filling him up and exploring him. Erik’s grasp on Charles tightened. He stood there for several moments, kissing Charles like he’d never kissed anyone before. Erik didn’t usually spend much time kissing, but he figured that was because he’d never dated anyone with a mouth like Charles’ before.

“Flattery,” Charles whispered against his face when he let go of Erik’s mouth.

“If it gets me kissed like that, I’ll flatter you more often.” 

Erik continued on the way to the bedroom and set Charles down. 

“You can get naked while I’m arranging pillows, you know,” Charles said.

“Your efficiency turns me on.”

“More flattery?”

“Just getting your mouth ready,” Erik said. Erik wasn’t sure if he was this turned on simply because he hadn’t had sex in so long, or if Charles was broadcasting his anticipation, but he was already hard. He got naked, put on a condom and got in bed. “Where do you want me?”

“You’ll figure it out,” Charles said. He rolled over and put a hand on Erik’s chest, pressing him down onto the bed, following the hand with his mouth. 

Erik wished the headboard was metal instead of wood but he found a knob in the carving to hold onto to keep himself from yanking on Charles. 

“Shift up, I can’t get down any further,” Charles told him. He had his hand wrapped around Erik’s cock and his nose in Erik’s sternum.

Erik swiped a pillow from Charles’ pile and propped himself into a half-seated position against the headboard. Charles wriggled until his chest was lying against Erik’s thigh and then he took Erik’s cock in his mouth. Erik gave a deep exhalation of pleasure and let a hand rest on Charles’ shoulder, squeezing in time to what Charles was doing to him. He felt his pleasure build and build under Charles’ skill with his mouth and then he was coming with a cry and Charles was rolling away from his arching hips.

In the afterglow, Erik slid back down in the bed and welcomed Charles snuggling onto his chest. For a long moment, the two of them lay there silently, Erik caressing Charles’ head and resisting the impulse to apologize for all the things he wanted to do to Charles but couldn’t.

“If you did want to fuck me, we would figure it out,” Charles said.

That was the second time tonight that Charles had responded to something Erik hadn’t said out loud. That was a change.

“Fucking isn’t that big of a deal for me,” Erik said.

“Do you always use a condom for oral sex?” Charles asked.

“I got tired of the mess. I wasn’t going to ask you to suck me bare our first time in any event. Just a second.” Erik went to the bathroom, stripped of the condom and wiped away some of the sweat. On his way back to the bed, he stepped back into his boxers before getting into the sheets and repositioning Charles where he fit so well. He combed his fingers through Charles’ hair for a few minutes before asking, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Erik felt Charles smile because it made his cheek move where he was pressed so closely to Erik. “What we did was enough. Don’t tell me it isn’t, okay? I know what I can and can’t do, and I don’t want you to pity me. I loved every second of it, just as much as you did.”

Erik bent to press a kiss against the top of Charles’ head. “Fine.”

Several minutes later, Charles rolled himself back over and repositioned the pillows for sleep.

“I’ll go back to my bed for the night. I can’t sleep if I’m touching someone,” Erik said.

“Alright,” Charles said, then he reached down and threaded his fingers through Erik’s.

“Can you fall asleep if you’re touching someone?” Erik asked.

“It’s been so long since I tried.” He didn’t let go of Erik’s hand.

“I’ll give it a try too,” Erik said.

“If you want.”

Erik didn’t say anything about the handholding. He just smiled at the ceiling. Working his way into Charles’ life didn’t happen fast, nor had it come with fireworks, but it felt solid and real. He wondered what he might have said six months ago if someone had told him that the man with the broken wheelchair was going to become a permanent fixture in his life. Then he wondered when he’d stopped thinking that he was going back to his company in Germany when the school year ended. Perhaps it was the day he’d chosen to weather the pandemic with Charles. Or the day he’d decided to stay in New York City for the winter holidays. Or the day he’d talked nonstop to his mother about Charles on their FaceTime call and then accused her of being overly sentimental when she started crying and smiling at the same time. Or the day he realized he didn’t care if Emma teased him about Charles.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of days when he could have gone a different direction.

Maybe he could get used to falling asleep with someone touching him.

He’d almost accomplished it when Charles spoke.

“I was 26. Wrong place at the wrong time. Classic problem, isn’t it? I was a bystander. The bullet ricocheted. One in a million shot. Total accident. Wasn’t intended for me at all.”

Erik knew all this from Google-stalking Charles. The newspapers had covered the Xavier heir’s tragic accident in depth, but he’d never heard Charles talk about it.

“Before the accident, I was a bit of a flirt. A slut, really.”

Erik stroked Charles’ hand with his thumb.

“I don’t think I ever stayed with the same guy more than a couple of months. I liked making them want me. It wasn’t even really the thrill of the chase; more like the thrill of being captured. I loved it when I could get some guy panting after me. I’d string him along as long as I could before giving him what he wanted. I always gave them what they wanted eventually. I was good at it, Erik, I was so fucking good.”

The eerie thing about the pandemic was how quiet New York City was now. You didn’t even realize there wasn’t any ambient noise until the only thing in the room were your lover’s bare words.

“Then I caught a bullet on the ricochet. Among other changes, I lost most of my sexual function. I tried, you know. After a year or so when the pain and exhaustion finally subsided enough to let me think about anything else, I tried to be a flirt again.”

That blue Dresden vase was right on the edge of the table.

“You can imagine how that went.” Charles gave a short, unhappy laugh. “Or maybe you can’t.”

If he said the wrong thing, Erik knew he would knock the vase off the table. He was taking the same risk by not saying anything at all. He compromised by squeezing Charles’ hand.

“Those guys on the Bachelorette were exactly my type: the age range, the muscles, the effortless ooze of sexy. Those are the guys I would have gone for. I mean, gay not straight, but like them. Before. You know. Just before.”

Erik lifted Charles’ hand and kissed it, then folded his other hand over the top to hold on and keep him steady. Right at the table’s edge.

Charles sniffed and raised his other hand to brush at his face. “I’m not sure they’re my type anymore.”

Erik went up on an elbow. “What’s your type now?”

“Fiftyish. Grumpy and skeptical. Appalled at my pantry. Skinny.”

“Skinny?”

“Oh yes. Very skinny. Nice broad shoulders though.”

Erik kissed him. Later that night, he found out that he could sleep even with someone touching him. Charles shifted further into the center of the bed, as far away from the edge as Erik could get him.


End file.
